al@well.sf.ca.us (Alfred Fontes) (08/25/90)
I've noticed in a couple of general-purpose C++ libraries that all of the classes descend from a single "Object" class. This has several benefits, and gives C++ some of the nice features of Smalltalk. This approach, however, was left out of the original language design. I get nervous about deriving everything from a single class, because doing so rejects that design decision. After all, maybe these class libraries are trading off strong type checking for extra flexibility. Or perhaps the "everything's an object" is perfectly acceptable, but was left out of C++ to maintain compatibility with existing code. Any comments about this?